Harmonic morphisms from homogeneous Hadamard manifolds

We present a new method for manufacturing complex-valued harmonic morphisms from a wide class of Riemannian Lie groups. This yields new solutions from an important family of homogeneous Hadamard manifolds. We also give a new method for constructing left-invariant foliations on a large class of Lie groups producing harmonic morphisms.     

Levi-parallel contact Riemannian manifolds

We study the Riemannian geometry of contact manifolds with respect to a fixed admissible metric, making the Reeb vector field unitary and orthogonal to the contact distribution, under the assumption that the Levi–Tanaka form is parallel with respect to a canonical connection with torsion.     

Flowers on Riemannian manifolds

In this paper, we will present two upper bounds for the length of a smallest “flower-shaped” geodesic net in terms of the volume and the diameter of a manifold. Minimal geodesic nets are critical points of the length functional on the space of graphs immersed into a Riemannian manifold. Let M ⁿ be a closed Riemannian manifold of dimension n. We prove that there exists a minimal geodesic net that consists of one vertex and at most 2n ? 1 geodesic loops based at that vertex of total length ≤ 2n!d, where d is the diameter of M ⁿ . We also show that there exists a minimal geodesic net that consists of one vertex and at most ${3^{(n+1)^2}}$ loops of total length ${\leq2 (n+1)!^2 3^{(n+1)^3}\,Fill\,Rad\,M^n \leq2(n+1)!^{\frac{5}{2}}3^{(n+1)^3}(n+1)n^n vol(M^n)^{\frac{1}{n}}}$ , where Fill Rad M ⁿ denotes the filling radius and vol(M ⁿ ) denotes the volume of M ⁿ .     

Knots in Riemannian manifolds

In this paper we study submanifolds with nonpositive extrinsic curvature in a positively curved manifold. Among other things we prove that, if ${K\subset (S^n, g)}$ is a totally geodesic submanifold of codimension 2 in a Riemannian sphere with positive sectional curvature where n ≥ 5, then K is homeomorphic to S ^n–2 and the fundamental group of the knot complement ${\pi _1(S^n-K)\cong \mathbb{Z}}$ .     

On f-bi-harmonic maps and bi-f-harmonic maps between Riemannian manifolds

Both bi-harmonic maps and f-harmonic maps have some nice physical motivation and applications.Motivated largely by f-tension field not involving Riemannian curvature tensor, we attempt to formalize some large objects so as to broaden the notions of f-tension field and bi-tension field. We introduce a very large generalization of harmonic maps called f-bi-harmonic maps as the critical points of f-bi-energy functional, and then derive the Euler-Lagrange equation of f-bi-energy functional given by the vanishing of f-bi-tension field.Subsequently, we study some properties of f-bi-harmonic maps between the same dimensional manifolds and give a non-trivial example. Furthermore, we also study the basic properties of f-bi-harmonic maps on a warped product manifold so that we could find some interesting and complicated examples.     

Harmonic morphisms and Riemannian geometry of tangent bundles

Let (TM, G) and \({(T_1 M,\tilde G)}\) respectively denote the tangent bundle and the unit tangent sphere bundle of a Riemannian manifold (M, g), equipped with arbitrary Riemannian g-natural metrics. After studying the geometry of the canonical projections π : (TM, G) → (M, g) and \({\pi_1:(T_1 M,\tilde G) \rightarrow (M,g)}\), we give necessary and sufficient conditions for π and π ₁ to be harmonic morphisms. Some relevant classes of Riemannian g-natural metrics will be characterized in terms of harmonicity properties of the canonical projections. Moreover, we study the harmonicity of the canonical projection \({\Phi:(TM-\{0\},G)\to (T_1 M,\tilde G)}\) with respect to Riemannian g-natural metrics \({G,\tilde G}\) of Kaluza–Klein type.     

Unique decomposition of Riemannian manifolds

We prove an extension of de Rham's decomposition theorem to the non-simply connected case.

     

Viability property on Riemannian manifolds

This Note studies a sufficient and necessary condition for the viability property of a state system in a closed subset K of a finite-dimensional compact Riemannian manifold without boundary. Our result is: the system enjoys the viability property in K if and only if the square of the distance function of K is a viscosity supersolution of a second-order partial differential equation in some neighborhood of K. To cite this article: S. Peng, X. Zhu, C. R. Acad. Sci. Paris, Ser. I 347 (2009).     

Minimal webs in Riemannian manifolds

For a given combinatorial graph G a geometrization (G, g) of the graph is obtained by considering each edge of the graph as a 1-dimensional manifold with an associated metric g. In this paper we are concerned with minimal isometric immersions of geometrized graphs (G, g) into Riemannian manifolds (N ⁿ , h). Such immersions we call minimal webs. They admit a natural ‘geometric’ extension of the intrinsic combinatorial discrete Laplacian. The geometric Laplacian on minimal webs enjoys standard properties such as the maximum principle and the divergence theorems, which are of instrumental importance for the applications. We apply these properties to show that minimal webs in ambient Riemannian spaces share several analytic and geometric properties with their smooth (minimal submanifold) counterparts in such spaces. In particular we use appropriate versions of the divergence theorems together with the comparison techniques for distance functions in Riemannian geometry and obtain bounds for the first Dirichlet eigenvalues, the exit times and the capacities as well as isoperimetric type inequalities for so-called extrinsic R-webs of minimal webs in ambient Riemannian manifolds with bounded curvature.      

Reflection groups on Riemannian manifolds

We investigate discrete groups G of isometries of a complete connected Riemannian manifold M which are generated by reflections, in particular those generated by disecting reflections. We show that these are Coxeter groups, and that the orbit space M/G is isometric to a Weyl chamber C which is a Riemannian manifold with corners and certain angle conditions along intersections of faces. We can also reconstruct the manifold and its action from the Riemannian chamber and its equipment of isotropy group data along the faces. We also discuss these results from the point of view of Riemannian orbifolds. Mathematics Subject Classification Primary 51F15, 53C20, 20F55, 22E40     

Clifford structures on Riemannian manifolds

We introduce the notion of even Clifford structures on Riemannian manifolds, which for rank r=2 and r=3 reduce to almost Hermitian and quaternion-Hermitian structures respectively. We give the complete classification of manifolds carrying parallel rank r even Clifford structures: Kähler, quaternion-Kähler and Riemannian products of quaternion-Kähler manifolds for r=2,3 and 4 respectively, several classes of 8-dimensional manifolds (for 5?r?8), families of real, complex and quaternionic Grassmannians (for r=8,6 and 5 respectively), and Rosenfeld?s elliptic projective planes OP², (C⊗O)P², (H⊗O)P² and (O⊗O)P², which are symmetric spaces associated to the exceptional simple Lie groups F₄, E₆, E₇ and E₈ (for r=9,10,12 and 16 respectively). As an application, we classify all Riemannian manifolds whose metric is bundle-like along the curvature constancy distribution, generalizing well-known results in Sasakian and 3-Sasakian geometry.     

Homogeneous almost normal Riemannian manifolds

In this article, we introduce a newclass of compact homogeneous Riemannian manifolds (M = G/H, µ) almost normal with respect to a transitive Lie group G of isometries for which by definition there exists a G-left-invariant and an H-right-invariant inner product ν such that the canonical projection p: (G, ν) → (G/H, µ) is a Riemannian submersion and the norm | · | of the product ν is at least the bi-invariant Chebyshev normon G defined by the space (M,µ).We prove the following results: Every homogeneous Riemannian manifold is almost normal homogeneous. Every homogeneous almost normal Riemannian manifold is naturally reductive and generalized normal homogeneous. For a homogeneous G-normal Riemannian manifold with simple Lie group G, the unit ball of the norm | · | is a Löwner-John ellipsoid with respect to the unit ball of the Chebyshev norm; an analogous assertion holds for the restrictions of these norms to a Cartan subgroup of the Lie group G. Some unsolved problems are posed.